Writing about Trust in Government, I wrote that I am one of those “dangerous and endangered class of people that says what I think about government when I disagree and do so in a public place.” I closed out that article by quoting Glenn Greenwald, of Salon magazine, saying “‘political liberties are meaningless if they’re conditioned on obeisance to political power or if citizens are frightened out of exercising them in any way that matters.'” At that time – oh, far off land of eight months prior! – I was writing about Wikileaks, with an aside mention of the protests in Wisconsin.
We have long since transitioned from Wisconsin to Occupy Wall Street. We’re in a similar state of affairs, in which there is widespread, international, support for the protesters but hesitancy and reticence by local government, and thus by police, whom the protesters claim to represent, to support Occupiers. By October 4th it was already clear that the NYPD and FBI were acting covertly to discredit the protesters. The “NYPD, Mayor Bloomberg (who made his fortune on Wall Street), the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House are doing everything possible to keep the occupation of Wall Street from reaching an ‘Arab Spring’ tipping point. Populist uprisings are lauded overseas, but they are perceived as a threat to elite corporate governance in the US.” On October 15th, in New York “what was unknown to a lot of people that day, including those in Times Square, was that there were undercover cops already there, paid to be disruptive and to be loud.” A protester who was arrested for joining a demonstration against the banks before closing his account said that “there are a ridiculous amount of undercover cops within the Occupy Wall Street movement that are making things less safe. There will be a mic check about how to stay safe, stay out of traffic, and the undercover cops interfere, lead people in the wrong way, in ways that are illegal, and get them sent to prison. You saw this in Times Square.”
What do the protesters want? “It takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling.” Meanwhile, the young, who do not start out rich, are getting poorer. “An entire generation of young people around the world has come of age only to find that the self-help-y mantras served up during their adolescence as a sort of substitute for economic policy no longer apply post-2007. Unemployment among 16 to 29-year-olds is at its highest rate since WWII.” It’s stands to reason that “a combination of inflated tuition costs and the proliferation of low-wage jobs is making the promise of financial security — and the dream of prosperity — increasingly elusive for many.” One of the issues – a sort of list of grievances – frequently brought up by the Occupiers at Wall Street and around the country is student debt. “In the U.S. alone, the total amount students owe will soon reach a trillion dollars, surpassing the amount owed on credit cards.”
A more recent Glenn Greenwald, from October 27th, elucidates our two-tiered society. “The powerful are treated with far more deference by judges than the powerless. The same cultural, socioeconomic, and demographic biases that plague society generally also infect the legal process. Few people who have had any interaction with the justice system would dispute this….Those” – notice the word those, which implies corporation-people as well as people-people – “with political and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever. The criminal justice system is now almost exclusively reserved for ordinary Americans, who are routinely subjected to harsh punishments even for the pettiest of offenses.” I intended to go into some depth about the similarities and differences between ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and the ‘Tea Party.’ I’ll save much of that for a different topic, but both groups fawn over the constitution. The difference is in how each side perceives the limits of government. To one, government is a force to limit corruption. To the other, government is a corruption to limited. For Greenwald, and for people who do not desire our disparate society, “the supremacy of law is not just one among many instruments of good government; it is good government itself. The converse is equally true: in the absence of the rule of law, good government cannot be said to exist….The central principle of America’s founding was that the rule of law would be the prime equalizing force, the ultimate guardian of justice.” It is clear, historically and rationally, that we need to turn to “the uniform application of a set of preexisting rules to everyone, including the rulers,” a system in which “the powerful [are] subjected to its dictates on equal terms with the powerless.”
Also, Occupy Wall Street is “against the corporations that corrupt the system, deplete the Treasury and ultimately aren’t held accountable for their crimes. The protesters are demanding that the corporate criminals who engaged in the shoddy, Machiavellian investment scams that plunged us into the deepest recession since the Great Depression be held accountable for their actions. To date, not a single instigator of the economic collapse has been prosecuted.” The list of grievances discussed by Occupy Wall Street is lengthy.
The subheader of an article titled “Occupy the No-Spin Zone” reads ‘one of the best things about Occupy Wall Street is the way it confuses and ignores the shrill pundit class.’ It is, therefore, hard to use media – particularly mainstream media such as television and syndicated articles, to enumerate the demands of a protest that does not make publish a list of demands. “What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television.” It’s hard not to agree that “it takes a walloping amount of willful cluelessness to look at a mass of people holding up signs and claim that they have no message.” Indeed, “Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another.”
Returning to the issue of trust, “the only people who are scared of the ‘violent mobs’ at Occupy Wall Street are the people being paid to call them violent mobs.” We started with Greenwald’s well-posited notion that “political liberties are meaningless if they’re conditioned on obeisance to political power or if citizens are frightened out of exercising them in any way that matters;” local governments have been attempting to frighten people of out exercising rights in any ways that matter. Overnight, on October 25th, “the police in both Oakland and Atlanta forcibly tried to shut down the Occupy movements in those cities.” “The reaction of Oakland police was extreme, firing beanbag rounds and flash canisters into the crowd and launching tear gas at them and driving them from a park they had occupied for two weeks.” Famously – and to say ‘stupidly’ or ‘unfortunately’ would be an understatement – a 24-year-old former Marine was hit in the head by a tear gas canister thrown by riot police. At the hospital – which protesters, not police, transported him to, he has gone from ‘critical’ to ‘fair’ condition. That may make little difference, as the often-beleaguered Oakland Police Department finds that this will lead to a general strike.
While it is clear that Scott Olson was hit by police wearing uniforms it is not unlikely that “right now” (says an article more than three weeks old), “the NYPD – and the FBI – are engaged in low intensity corralling of the protesters. They are playing a waiting game, hoping that the protest will exhaust itself. But if the participants grow – as appears to be the case with the increasing support of unions and the enhanced credibility of the movement – watch for a law enforcement “false flag” operation. You’ll know about it instantly, because it will probably be the first time you’ll see any serious interest in the Wall Street protests on TV. The revolution won’t be televised; but the government takedown of democracy and peaceful assembly will be.” The “revolution” was not the topic of television before Scott Olson (except for the occasional “what can it all mean”), but now television has an intriguing story.
And “Atlanta’s finest were more peaceful as they just arrested all fifty people occupying a park in downtown Atlanta and handcuffed them and carried them off to jail, but the result was the same, a metropolitan police force at the direction of its mayor attacked its own citizens for peacefully assembling and protesting its government.” I’m sure that John Talbott is correct that “if this had happened in China or Syria, our state department would be filing letters of protest as we speak.” In the first month of the Occupy Wall Street movement – on October 18th – 1,500 American citizens had been arrested in cities and towns across the country. While a small handful of them have been charged with various acts of mayhem, the vast majority were peacefully demonstrating. Most of the arrested won’t be charged, but it will “keep them off the streets” for a little while.
On its face, ‘occupying’ public space should be guaranteed under the First Amendment. The courts have long held that ‘expressive activities’ are accorded the same protections as the right to speak or freedom of the press….The First Amendment’s guarantees are not, however, absolute. The government is able to determine the appropriate time, place and manner for citizens to speak their mind, as long as those restrictions are based on maintaining public order and aren’t designed to prevent a particular message from getting out….The state can’t place limits that effectively leave no outlet for citizens’ expression.
It didn’t take long – less than twenty-four hours, if you look at things from a certain angle – for the Occupy movement to become an international movement. One of the original members, who arrived on September 18th, the second day, is Kobi Skolnick, an ex-settler and Chabadnik turned non-Observant Israeli. This is not the only protest Skolnick ever participated in. “‘I participated in protests against the Oslo Accords. I was an activist for Zo Artzenu. I was also arrested during the protests. But I have undergone a change and today I do not agree with their opinions and with their extreme ideologies. It’s not as though I accept the murderous acts of terrorists, but you can’t ignore the fact that the Palestinians suffered,’ he said. ‘Today I’m a man of peace, [looking] to bring about world change.'”
In London, people are occupying the plaza of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Football (what we call soccer) was noticeable in mid-October, not long after the camp begin. “it’s starting a conversation;” not all the players are campers, some are bankers passing by. It’s “what the camp stands for: dialogue.” People always impatiently ask what the occupiers’ ‘demands’ are, and why collectively they seem unwilling, or unable to provide quick-fix solutions. These questions miss the point….If anything, the camp itself is their demand, and their solution: the stab at an alternative society that at least aims to operate without hierarchy, and with full, participatory democracy.”
The Occupy camp in New York, meanwhile, is using an economic system that seems to work: Larry, a 47-year-old licensed barber from Staten Island, gives free haircuts and shaves at his makeshift barbershop complete with clippers, scissors and one of those cloaks that keep hair off the customers’ clothes. “Well, I’ve been here, protesting and supporting, and I figured today was going to be a nice day, no rain. Why not, you know? Let me do what I can to help people.” One of the most striking things about volunteer labor is the duration of workers’ stamina – workers who, at a wage-paying job, might well be checking the clock every few minutes. Nick the tobacconist has no plans to stop rolling cigarettes as long as the occupation of Wall Street rolls on. Says Larry the barber, “I’m going to be here until I need a break; I got a big line coming later on today.”
Yesterday I had the lack of pleasure of engaging in a one-sided conversation in which I did not do the speaking. She who was speaking at me was talking about how peace will not come to the world until the uninformed are informed, and that the whole problem with society is misinformation. You may well imagine the staccato in which this was said – you’ve heard these people before. Iran entered the conversation. Does Iran have nuclear weapons? Clearly, yes, because Iran is said to have nuclear weapons.
Now, I can only go on information here, but the International Atomic Energy Agency, the international regulatory agency in charge of nuclear power, says that Iran is nowhere close to nuclear capability. Additionally, in speaking about the horrors Iran has in store for America, and misinformation in the information age, Mississippi asked Iran to send doctors to teach an American state about how to run healthcare. This is an AP article; it’s hardly fair to blame the media alone for keeping us misinformed.
An NYPD policy:
An undercover man ran up from behind and tackled me. Next, he decked me. He said someone had been robbed and I “fit the description.” It soon became clear what “description” he was talking about. He and other cops had also stopped a 40-something year old who was 5’6″ with a full beard. I was only 13 years old, no facial hair yet, and six feet tall. The only thing we had in common was our Black skin and our stylish trench coats (which, again, everybody was wearing).
That was 1961. Things haven’t changed. “This is the reality of what goes on in New York City alone with the New York Police Department’s policy of ‘Stop & Frisk.’ More than 83 percent of those stopped are Black or Latino, many are as young as 11 or 12, and more than 90 percent of them were doing nothing wrong when the police stopped, humiliated, brutalized them or worse.”
Today Carl Dix is “joining arms with Cornel West and others to voluntarily land myself in the custody of the police. We are conducting non-violent civil disobedience at the 28th Police Precinct in Harlem, New York to put a stop to the NYPD policy of ‘Stop & Frisk.'”
End the policy.
Presidents get very little credit for doing things they said they would do, and that we want done. Obama announced today that “America’s war in Iraq will be over” by the end of the year. This is what he promised us, and this is what he ran on in 2008. Still, it feels like there’s a feeling of “meh, well he told us he’d end the war. Big deal.” It’s not a feeling of sarcasm, but of indifference.
I am indescribably glad that we’re ending a war we should never have started. I also value a president that keeps his word, especially when he keeps his word on a policy or action I agree with. Also, I praise Obama for ending a war. Very few presidents get to announce that a war has ended. Still, I feel like it won’t be remembered as a major accomplishment that Obama ended a war. The media will rush off to the next conflict, protest, or attention-deficit grabbing topic.
Pause for a moment, and give President Obama credit for bringing our troops home.
A couple months ago, “Occupy Wall Street” wasn’t a phrase. The Arab Spring was just ending; it was spilling over into Israel, which was having its own Israeli Summer. People were camped out on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv protesting many of the same things as those before them in Tahrir Square in Egypt and those after them in Zuccotti Park in New York. “Social justice isn’t only about alleviating poverty. It is about a very simple idea: people should be able to make a decent living if they invest in their education, take a lot of responsibility and work hard.”
In February, I wrote an article about why there would be no protests in Israel.
Why should people here take to the streets? We have democracy, don’t we? Free press, free consumption, a flourishing free market. People aren’t going hungry, Facebook and Twitter are open to everyone.
But the truth is that it is difficult to expect the Israeli public to take to the streets, because in fact it has too many things to protest….continued occupation, the recurrent wars, depriving workers’ rights, diminishing health and welfare services, increasing and aggravating societal gaps of all kinds, and – in more recent years – eroding democratic rights and personal freedoms, and growing government corruption.
The difference I see between this critique of Israel, and any critique of America, is the word ‘occupation, and the difference between the word ‘Israeli’ or ‘American’.
I was, I need hardly point out, quite mistaken. Israelis took to the streets to protest – indeed, to occupy – several months later. The reasons should be obvious. Graduates with an MA in Clinical Psychology found that
after having worked around the clock to enter one of the most competitive programs in higher education; after having studied about the human soul and how to alleviate psychological suffering, the outlook for their future was bleak.
After finishing their MA, in order to qualify as clinical psychologists, they have to do a four-year internship, at least 30 hours a week, for which they receive less than NIS 2,000 a month. This means that all of them will have to take additional jobs, often late into the night, to make ends meet. To make things worse: many of them will have to wait for up to three years to find a slot for the internship. “I finished my studies to continue working as a waiter”, one of them said.
You may have noticed that this situation is not unique to Israel. Indeed, the lucky college graduates in America are able to begin or keep their job waiting tables or tending bars; the unlucky ones have occasional volunteer jobs (or pay money to have an internship), and most live at home with their parents because nothing else is economically feasible.
The reasons for Occupy Wall Street should be obvious. “What we’re demanding – what people in the Occupy movement are demanding – is the same responsibility from these large institutions, and the so-called 1%. It’s really that simple.” And, “many people are asking why? While the occupation of city squares all over the nation is inspiring many people, others are (understandably) a bit perplexed. But I think people understand more than they know. Something is very wrong with our country and our world. The rich got richer from our economic crisis and the poor barely got the crumbs from their banquet table.”
And, “in the midst of the financial crash of 2008, enormous debts between banks were renegotiated. Yet only a fraction of troubled mortgages have gotten the same treatment. [Professor David Graeber] said: ‘Debts between the very wealthy or between governments can always be renegotiated and always have been throughout world history. … It’s when you have debts owed by the poor to the rich that suddenly debts become a sacred obligation, more important than anything else. The idea of renegotiating them becomes unthinkable.'” It’s not surprising that “President Barack Obama has proposed a jobs plan and further efforts to reduce the deficit. One is a so-called millionaire’s tax, endorsed by billionaire Obama supporter Warren Buffett. The Republicans call the proposed tax ‘class warfare.'”
After all, we see a
powerful cultural protest against the corruption of capitalism in the last decade, the crony-ridden political system that even now is trying to stall or gut Dodd-Frank, and against the staggering inequalities that now exist in this country and threaten to change its core democratic nature. And this is a good thing. It’s a good thing because it provides essential balance to the Tea Party’s case against government as a whole. Only one entity can restore some equity to the system and it’s government. Disempowering government at a time when the current system is consigning millions to decades of unemployment while rewarding a fraction of that with simply unimaginable rewards … that’s a recipe for social unrest.
In other words, this street movement is emerging to demand some accountability from the bankers who helped destroy this economy, from the politicians who used our money to save them, from the GOP even now balking at basic regulations on Wall Street to help prevent another crash, and from Obama whose conciliatory style so many now regard as betrayal.
It’s a question of movement and mood. The anger was first directed at Obama from the right (and largely redirected away from Bush and Cheney). Now it is being directed at those who were rescued after staggering recklessness. Each mood creates a different climate.
Or we could just read communiques put out from Occupy, which still has a somewhat participatory, horizontal leadership, structure. “On Saturday we held a general assembly, two thousand strong. … By 8 p.m. on Monday we still held the plaza, despite constant police presence. … We are building the world that we want to see, based on human need and sustainability, not corporate greed.” Not everyone who attempts to interview the group appreciates the style, though. Although the group “declares it is for and by everyone, that everyone has equal say and no claim to leadership over anyone else. I [Michael Morgenstern] was told that having a blog did not qualify me as media; that if I wanted to count as media, I would have to attend a media leadership training the next day, and until then I would have to leave.”
Also, the reaction from the establishment left, which for years and decades has been working on the same cause as Occupy Wall Street, has been somewhat mixed or unflattering. “There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant”. Union leaders, as they bargain away rights and benefits of the rank and file, know the foundations are shaking. “So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of ‘liberal’ groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.” The official Obama campaign position is that the movement is exciting, but that the campaign can’t take a position or help in any way.
Chris Hedges, perhaps a tad pessimistic, found that “these protesters in that one glorious moment did what the traditional ‘liberal’ establishment has steadily refused to do—fight back. Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to ‘clean’ the premises.” However, in a realpolitik sense, Hedges is right that
tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart. But the liberal class has no credibility left. It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars. The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along. Groups such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the protests. The Teamsters’ arrival Friday morning to help defend the park signaled an infusion of this new radicalism into moribund unions rather than a co-opting of the protest movement by the traditional liberal establishment. The union bosses, in short, had no choice.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters. It proposes something new. It will not make concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power. It holds fast to moral imperatives regardless of the cost. It confronts authority out of a sense of responsibility. It is not interested in formal positions of power. It is not seeking office. It is not trying to get people to vote. It has no resources. It can’t carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or run millions of dollars of advertisements. All it can do is ask us to use our bodies and voices, often at personal risk, to fight back. It has no other way of defying the corporate state. This rebellion creates a real community instead of a managed or virtual one. It affirms our dignity. It permits us to become free and independent human beings.
In fact, Occupy Wall Street is something of a moral imperative. “What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?”
showed that hundreds of defense contractors found guilty of civil fraud received more than $1.1 trillion in defense contracts since 2001. The study only took into account companies that were found to have defrauded taxpayers of more than $1 million dollars.
More than $573 billion went directly to companies that were guilty of defrauding taxpayers, and when you factor in the awards that went to the parent companies of those contractors, the total is $1.1 trillion. Of that $573 billion, over two-thirds–$398 billion—went to companies after they had been found guilty of fraud.
Some of the country’s biggest defense contractors were implicated. “The ugly truth is that virtually all of the major defense contractors in this country for years have been engaged in systemic fraudulent behavior, while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money,” said Sanders. According to the report:
Lockheed Martin in 2008 paid $10.5 million to settle charges that it defrauded the government by submitting false invoices on a multi-billion dollar contract connected to the Titan IV space launch vehicle program. That didn’t seem to sour the relationship between Lockheed and the Defense Department, which gave Lockheed $30.2 billion in contracts in fiscal year 2009, more than ever before.
In another case, Northrop Grumman paid $62 million in 2005 to settle charges that it “engaged in a fraud scheme by routinely submitting false contract proposals,” and “concealed basic problems in its handling of inventory, scrap and attrition.” Despite the serious charges of pervasive and repeated fraud, Northrop Grumman received $12.9 billion in contracts the next year, 16 percent more than the year before.
Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman, on Why Judaism Embraces Science:
“There’s a great Yiddish expression that says, “If I knew God, I’d be God.” In fact, I think that claiming that you “know God’s will” is an act of incredible hubris. Instead, what we say about God has much more to say about us than about God…
And while I can only speak personally here, to me, “God” isn’t really a noun at all — it’s a verb.
Here’s why. The most common name that God gives Godself in the Torah is “YHVH,” a name that is sometimes thought to be so holy that no one was allowed to pronounce it. But that’s not exactly right — it’s not that “YHVH” was not allowed to be pronounced, it’s that it is literally unpronounceable, since it consists of four Hebrew vowels (yod, hay, vav and hay). By the way, that’s also why some people incorrectly call this name “Yahweh,” since (as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner once said), if you tried to pronounce a name that was all vowels, you’d risk serious respiratory injury.
But even more importantly, the name YHVH is actually a conflation of all the tenses of the Hebrew verb “to be.” God’s name could be seen as “was-is-will be,” so God isn’t something you can’t capture or name — God is only something you can experience….
God responds that God’s name is “Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” which is often translated as “I am what I am.” But it could also be translated as, “I am what I will be.” So God is whatever God will be — we simply have no idea. Indeed, for my own theology, I believe that God is found in the “becoming,” transforming “what will be” into “what is….”
Science is about creating hypotheses and testing data against these theories. Judaism is about how we act to improve this world, here and now.”
For the second time in a month, I announce that I was without wireless internet in my domain (er, home),which severely limited my ability to write social commentary here.
Indeed, I can quote myself from a few weeks ago, and the statement is almost the same.
If you’ve been following along you may have noticed a lapse in fairly regular discourse here. As I was preparing a many-part series about, and to be begun on, 9/11 the technology so may of us take for granted was turned off. Lacking in wireless internet, my internet was limited to hard-wiring my computer in other rooms in the house, or Starbucks.
I now have wireless internet, for which I am doubly thankful now that I’ve experienced trying to write, email, facebook, and work without a dependable connection.
I have returned, with a backlog of things to write about, about ten days of news I’ve missed, and things that should be done.
Unlike various government agencies, including the Post Office, which face shut down or reduction in funding, I think I can continue to provide my usual services now that I have internet.
The Dole Blog 